Parse usable Street Address, City, State, Zip from a string [closed]

Answer 1

Based on the sample data:

1. I would start at the end of the string. Parse a Zip-code (either format). Read end to first space. If no Zip Code was found Error.

2. Trim the end then for spaces and special chars (commas)

3. Then move on to State, again use the Space as the delimiter. Maybe use a lookup list to validate 2 letter state codes, and full state names. If no valid state found, error.

4. Trim spaces and commas from the end again.

5. City gets tricky, I would actually use a comma here, at the risk of getting too much data in the city. Look for the comma, or beginning of the line.

6. If you still have chars left in the string, shove all of that into an address field.

This isn't perfect, but it should be a pretty good starting point.

Answer 2

I've done this in the past.

Either do it manually, (build a nice gui that helps the user do it quickly) or have it automated and check against a recent address database (you have to buy that) and manually handle errors.

Manual handling will take about 10 seconds each, meaning you can do 3600/10 = 360 per hour, so 4000 should take you approximately 11-12 hours. This will give you a high rate of accuracy.

For automation, you need a recent US address database, and tweak your rules against that. I suggest not going fancy on the regex (hard to maintain long-term, so many exceptions). Go for 90% match against the database, do the rest manually.

Do get a copy of Postal Addressing Standards (USPS) at http://pe.usps.gov/cpim/ftp/pubs/Pub28/pub28.pdf and notice it is 130+ pages long. Regexes to implement that would be nuts.

For international addresses, all bets are off. US-based workers would not be able to validate.

Alternatively, use a data service. I have, however, no recommendations.

Furthermore: when you do send out the stuff in the mail (that's what it's for, right?) make sure you put "address correction requested" on the envelope (in the right place) and update the database. (We made a simple gui for the front desk person to do that; the person who actually sorts through the mail)

Finally, when you have scrubbed data, look for duplicates.

Answer 3

Are there any standards at all in the way that the addresses are recorded? For example:

1. Are there always commas or new-lines separating street1 from street2 from city from state from zip?
2. Are address types (road, street, boulevard, etc) always spelled out? always abbreviated? Some of each?
3. Define "error".

My general answer is a series of Regular Expressions, though the complexity of this depends on the answer. And if there is no consistency at all, then you may only be able to achieve partial success with a Regex (ie: filtering out zip code and state) and will have to do the rest by hand (or at least go through the rest very carefully to make sure you spot the errors).

Answer 4

This won't solve your problem, but if you only needed lat/long data for these addresses, the Google Maps API will parse non-formatted addresses pretty well.

Answer 5

Another request for sample data.

As has been mentioned I would work backwards from the zip.

Once you have a zip I would query a zip database, store the results, and remove them & the zip from the string.

That will leave you with the address mess. MOST (All?) addresses will start with a number so find the first occurrence of a number in the remaining string and grab everything from it to the (new) end of the string. That will be your address. Anything to the left of that number is likely an addressee.

You should now have the City, State, & Zip stored in a table and possibly two strings, addressee and address. For the address, check for the existence of "Suite" or "Apt." etc. and split that into two values (address lines 1 & 2).

For the addressee I would punt and grab the last word of that string as the last name and put the rest into the first name field. If you don't want to do that, you'll need to check for salutation (Mr., Ms., Dr., etc.) at the start and make some assumptions based on the number of spaces as to how the name is made up.

I don't think there's any way you can parse with 100% accuracy.

Answer 6

There is javascript port of perl Geo::StreetAddress::US package: https://github.com/hassansin/parse-address . It's regex-based and works fairly well.